Ann & Tony’s restaurant in the Arthur Avenue section of Belmont in the Bronx is one of the oldest continually operating Italian restaurants in the borough, dating back to the 1920s.

Twitter is a very interesting phenomenon. I’ve only really started using it in the last year, initially as way of sending automatic updates from OTB and Tech Broiler to people who actually cared about using the service. A year ago, I thought the idea was pretty pointless, with these limited 140-character messages that people send out that everyone on the Internet can see, which seemed to focus on fairly dumb, exhibitionist status updates such as “eating a Cannoli” or “This alfredo sauce is @#$%ing awesome dude!” so I stayed away from issuing my own updates because I didn’t want to look like a total ass. I knew a lot of people were LOOKING at Twitter, but I didn’t feel like engaging in it beyond the “let’s feed my blog updates into it and see how it goes” capacity.

But then something else happened. I joined FaceBook, which hooked me up with a lot of old friends and many other foodie and technology industry colleagues. But FaceBook, like Twitter, requires you to enter updates about what is going on with your daily life to make your friends feel like you haven’t fallen off the face of the earth. So if I was now committing to doing FaceBook updates, I might as well start updating my Twitter as well. So I downloaded Twitter software for my Blackberry and my PC and started sending updates to Twitter, and automatically syncing those to FaceBook.

@jperlow saw your tweet about Arthur Ave. When are you coming to eat in my restaurant…LOL!!!

So I look Ralph up. Along with this brother Anthony, he Co-owns Ann & Tony’s, one of the many Italian-American restaurants on Arthur Avenue. Normally, when restaurateurs want me to come visit, I usually get an email extending an invite to an open house or a press event, or sometimes even a phone call from a publicist, but receiving a challenge over Twitter to come eat was a first. Okay, then, I’ll play. What kind of guy broadcasts a message like that to the entire Internet and not expect a serious foodie like myself to take him up on it?

I told him I was coming over that very evening, with hungry wife and friend in tow, and he had better be ready to face the consequences if the food wasn’t any good.

As I explained in a previous article last summer about my broadband situation, my employer, like many large technology services companies, has elected to classify my work situation as “Home-Based”, in that when I am not at a customer site, I’m working from home. So for connectivity to corporate email, our Intranet and Instant Messaging system, my link to the mother ship is entirely dependent on the reliability of my connectivity through Optimum Online, Cablevision’s cable broadband service.

While Off The Broiler is primarily focused on food, as many of you know, I also write technology articles for ZDNet, CBS’s technology news site. Over the last few months I have been teaming up with Linux Magazine and DaniWeb columnist Ken Hess, where we broadcast live on BlogTalkRadio every Friday at 6:30PM EST on leveraging technology to save you and your business money. The format of the show is news and commentary for the first half hour, with the second reserved for special guests from the technology industry. This summer we are going to be featuring a lot of Linux and Open Source guests, so be sure to tune in.

I began my relationship with Linux Magazine in the Summer of 1999. My, what a long strange trip it has been.

In 1999, Linux and Open Source’s position in the computer industry was very different. Hell, the entire world was different — Bill Clinton was nearing the end of his presidency, and Windows 2000 was nearing the end of its beta cycle, marking the beginning of the full transition from the old DOS-based PC paradigm on the corporate desktop to the mass-adoption of the Windows NT kernel, which would complete a year later with the release of Windows XP in the consumer space.

When you think of Thanksgiving, what images come into your mind? If you’re a typical American and have visions of Norman Rockwell paintings engraved into your consciousness like the rest of us, it’s Roast Turkey, mom’s doctored Pepperidge Farm Stuffing (Just say no to Stove-Top!), cranberry sauce, sweet potatoes and pumpkin pie, naturally. Which ends of course with the usual gut-busting feeling from over eating accompanied by the eventual belt-loosening and football watching on grandma’s couch. Aaaaaaaaaaah.

But this year, I’ve decided to switch gears. I’m going to be doing my turkey Puerto Rican style — Pavochon Ahumada rubbed with garlic adobo and smoked over hardwood for several hours on my Weber Bullet, ditching the stuffing for Arroz con Gandules, and am giving thanks to a different bird — the Penguin, and everyone who made him possible.

A few weeks ago I evaluated Amazon’s Kindle. While I really liked the device, the big problem I had with it was that at its current price of $359.00 it was too expensive at this point for mass consumer adoption. I also had a number of issues with the fact that despite being based on Linux, the device is a closed book, literally.

At what point, however, do consumers start ditching their dead-tree books for e-books? And how many books do you actually have to read per year in order for the convenience factor of the Kindle — its light weight, its ability to store hundreds of books in its memory, and the instant gratification of being able to download books via the Amazon Whispernet EVDO Sprint network — to outweigh its costs?

Since the device’s theoretical conception in 1968 and a publication of a paper proposing its use in 1972 when Kay was at Xerox’s PARC, many of the technologies that were in Kay’s conceptual device finally did come to fruition, such as portable and mobile computing, GUIs, and object-oriented programming languages. But has the Dynabook truly been realized?